I've just read Galrahn's post below and the article it links to by General Scales, and I liked the latter better than the former.
General Scales' article is a serious proposal to tackle a serious issue--the requirement for a professionalized approach to strategy and strategic thinking in the military. The good folks at CSBA took a stab at this subject in the recently released "Regaining Strategic Competence", an essay well worth reading all the way through if you have the time, if for no other reason than to give you a much better appreciation for the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower.
That said, this paragraph of Galrahn's got my dander up a bit:
"The Navy takes a beating on the subject of strategy, fairly or not. Whether in books or even by Naval officers, the reputation for strategic excellence in today's Navy is simply not there. When I ask retired officers about it, they usually say something like "in my twenty something years as a Naval officer, it was never something I was exposed to."
I have a couple of responses to this.
1. The chattering classes in Washington DC have fallen in love with Counterinsurgency Theory, and have elevated it to the level of grand strategy. Worse than that, it seems as though if you ain't thinking COIN, you're just not thinking strategically. Hence, this scurrilous and oft repeated charge that the Navy just doesn't think strategically.
2. If the Navy doesn't think strategically, then why do we currently have a CJCS, a EUCOM, a PACOM, and a SOCOM commander? Are these not premier "strategic" positions within the US military? If we are so pitiful at making strategic thinkers, from where did these men come? Is the Director of National Intelligence not a former Navy four-star? Did we not have a former Navy four-star as the Ambassador to China in recent memory?
3. Thinking strategically and churning out uniformed PhD's are two separate things, and they should not be confused.
4. Did the US Navy (alongside its maritime partners in the Coast Guard and Marine Corps) not just three years ago dedicate the entire professional lives of a dozen officers full-time for fourteen months--not to mention hundreds of pros from the Naval War College and the Fleet--to the formulation and promulgation of a maritime strategy--called for by....a CNO who saw the value in both the process and the product? Did the Army do this? Has the Air Force? Did the Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff in the Fall of 2007 not get their butts handed to them by Representative Skelton for coming to the Hill asking for $20B and not having a "story" to tell about how the Air Force was going to contribute to the safety and security of the nation?
5. Are Galrahn's retired 20 year folks who claim not to have been asked to think strategically or participate in the creation of strategy really evidence that there is a deficit of strategic thinking in the Navy? I spent two years in N3N5 at the end of my career and I was surrounded by very bright people thinking and writing strategically every day. When we had the worldwide N3N5 conferences (at which I briefed the maritime strategy), I always came away impressed with the quality of the thinkers we had on station on the edges of the empire.
6. Thinking strategically and the ability to write clearly and coherently are linked--and let's face it, there are simply fewer and fewer good writers out there today. Within the Navy--I guarantee you--good writers are known quantities (because there are so few of them) and the system seems to be able to find them and put them where they need to go.
Can the Navy do better? Yes. I think the pressure exerted on the Navy to make sure more people went to the war colleges as residents (courtesy of Rep Skelton and Secretary Rumsfeld) was important. I think the Navy could go a long way toward General Scales' vision of the future by simply detailing promising strategists to multiple tours in their careers.
But does the Navy think "less" strategically than the other services? Nope. Not in my experience.
Bryan McGrath
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